Interview by Deniz Yükseker

From the editors:

Starting with this issue, we will feature interviews with researchers, practitioners, and artists on themes that we hope the readers of New Perspectives on Turkey will find inspiring and stimulating. Our first guest is Seteney Shami, the founding director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) since 2012.

Many social science researchers who work on Turkey have crossed paths with Shami at some point in their careers. They might have met her or corresponded with her while searching for funds for their research or while organizing or participating in a conference. They might have consulted her publications on a range of topics pertaining to the Middle East.

Seteney Shami is an anthropologist from Jordan with a BA from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and an MA and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently on leave from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), where she directs the InterAsia Program. She has worked at Yarmouk University in Jordan, as well as at the Population Council in Cairo, where she was the director of the MEAwards Program between 1996 and 1999. She has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Georgetown University, the University of Chicago, Stockholm University, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Uppsala).

Just as her professional itinerary is diverse, her research has also spanned diverse areas. Her fieldwork has focused on Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. Her research interests center on issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the context of globalization, urban politics and state-building strategies, and population displacement and transnational mobility.

Seteney Shami has contributed to institutions that fund research on the Middle East through her work at MEAwards, the SSRC, and now at the ACSS. As such, she has firsthand knowledge and insights on the institutions that sponsor research in the region and how research agendas and the practice of research are influenced by political exigencies and conflict in the North as well as in the region.

In this interview, Shami talks about how her personal biography shaped her research interests, as well as how her grounding in the relatively small diasporic community of Circassians has allowed her to go beyond national and ethnic boundaries to think about research across borders. Furthermore, she invites us to question our established ideas concerning social science research about the Middle East, in terms of both concepts and institutions. One remarkable aspect of her professional and academic career has been her unrelenting emphasis on scholarly community building in terms of shaping research agendas, collaborative research, and the creation and sustaining of institutions. We hope that readers will find Shami’s views and experiences on these issues to be engaging and thought-provoking.

December 26, 2014

Beirut

Deniz Yükseker: Can you tell us about your family?

Seteney Shami: Where to start? How many generations ago should we start, this is always the question when asked about family. I grew up in Jordan. My father is from Palestine, my mother from İstanbul. They are both from Circassian families. So our Circassian identity was quite important to us when growing up; it was something my parents emphasized a lot. But at the same time the connections to İstanbul as a city, more than Turkey as a country, were very strong, and of course our connection to Amman was very strong. It was a very small city when I was a child but I was very fond of it. So as a child growing up, there was this kind of dual identification with two cities rather than two countries.

DY: You said that your father is from Palestine, but that your Circassian background was also very important in your family. What do you mean—your father being both Circassian and being from Palestine?

SS: Well, as you know, waves of Circassian migrants came into the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s when the Russian Empire finally conquered the whole of the Caucasus. Then many hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people emigrated from the Caucasus into the Ottoman Empire. Basically, they were either Muslim or they became Muslim once they entered into Ottoman lands. There were Circassians, Chechens, Georgians and Dagestanians, and many different ethnic and linguistic groups. The Ottomans settled these migrants in different parts of the empire. So this was a very turbulent time for the Ottoman Empire, and there is not enough research on this really, but basically they had migrations from all directions and there was a lot of confusion. People got settled, some of them in a more organized way and some of them in a less organized way. So Circassians, who constitute only one of these groups from the Caucasus, were settled in many parts of what is today Turkey, as well as what is today Syria and what is today Jordan and two villages in Palestine.

DY: And your father is from one of those villages?

SS: My father was from one of those, yes; it is called Kufr Kama and is in the Lake Tiberias area. Those lands became Israel in 1948. My father and a few members of his family were outside at the time of the war and they could not go back. And so he had to settle in Jordan. He was already a medical doctor at that point, having graduated from the American University in Beirut in 1947. So he settled in Jordan and got Jordanian citizenship, as did many other Palestinian refugees at that time; he met my mother in the early 1950s and they got married. She came to Jordan to live with him. My grandmother and my uncles were in İstanbul. I always joke and say that “we are pure and hybrid at the same time” because we have Turkey, Palestine, and Jordan, all of these different nationalities, but the link is being Circassian. […] The Circassian identity was very important ideologically, but in practice, we did not know many Circassians, we did not go and visit and interact and take part in the Circassian community to any great extent.

I have written about this in an article on fieldwork experiences,Footnote ¹ about doing research on Circassians in Jordan for my Ph.D. dissertation. After I finished my Ph.D., I also did research in poor, squatter areas of Amman where Palestinian refugees lived. In the article, I talked about how different parts of my identity were engaged when doing fieldwork with different communities. I think this is an important point. We all know, but we sometimes forget, that since we have many dimensions to our identities, when we do fieldwork with different groups of people and different parts of society, we engage different parts of ourselves in those interactions. So the interesting thing in the Circassian research was that I really knew very little about daily life among Circassians or how they thought about things or saw themselves: I only had my own family’s narration of what it meant to be Circassian. And so doing fieldwork among Circassians in Jordan was really a discovery, even though it would be seen as if I were studying myself. And with Palestinian refugees, there were more class differences and educational differences than [with] the Circassians. But there was also a Palestinian narrative, a story that I could tell. They knew my father’s village, or at least the area, and there was the commonality of generations of dispossession. As an anthropologist, as an ethnographer, the connections you make during fieldwork are very important, and they are multiple. It can be through your gender, it can be through your ethnicity, and it can be through a family. Each one opens different doors and closes others.

DY: You started talking about your dissertation research and post-dissertation research, but I want to take a step back and ask you some questions about your undergraduate education at the American University of Beirut. You started in 1972. You came to Beirut before the civil war started and you were here during the civil war. Your family background in Amman and İstanbul all played a role in your formation, but what about Beirut and your education at AUB?

SS: I was 16 when I came to the university, so I was very young. It was between the ages of 16 and 20 that I was here. […] I came here thinking I would study history, something like that, and then I discovered sociology, anthropology, and all these other fields that I had never even heard about. […] Especially in anthropology you read about the feeling of being a stranger in society, being out of society. There was a lot to figure out about my background and where I fit. At the time, before the civil war the Lebanese army bombed Palestinian camps in 1974, and there was the 1973 war with Israel, although Lebanon was not directly involved in the fighting. But we were completely caught up with that. Wounded Syrian soldiers were being brought into hospitals in Beirut. We students were volunteering. I think we were more useless than useful in the volunteering. We were going to the hospitals, trying to help. That was a very transformative moment. […] The civil war formally began in 1975, but the 1973 war with Israel was there. There were clashes all around, but even growing up in Jordan, I had experienced the 1970 civil war, and there was the 1967 war with Israel as well. The experience of being in a conflict zone was always with us—I would never say we took it for granted—but there was a kind of “life goes on” thing. Lebanon, really to the present day, is amazing in that sense. Things just keep going on.

DY: Can you tell us how the surrounding conflict affected your views about doing social science or your political views?

SS: Here I am a little bit critical of AUB because the faculty and the courses did not really engage with what was going on. On campus there were political activities, student activism, and civic engagement, as I mentioned, during the 1973 war, and with poor communities, especially in southern Lebanon. And then there were the courses, which did not engage with these issues. I always thought that the social sciences needed to be more engaged with all the things we were experiencing as students, as young people living here. For the undergraduates, it was as though you had your courses and then here there was this world which was completely different. In terms of intellectual formation, obviously the political context—especially the Palestinian student movement, and generally the Palestinian movement, both of which were very strong on our campus—was very important.

My recollection of that time is about trying to make sense of the world using tools from the classes. We studied social theory. We studied Marx, Hegel, Kant, and Weber. I was trying to fit these social science concepts to what I was hearing in meetings and rallies or in analyses of the Arab situation, the Palestinian situation. Although educational establishments did not make those connections, it was so obvious what was going on about poverty, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and national self-determination, and that we were living in historic times. I think that kind of consciousness was very high. […] When the civil war started, it was my last year; I had only 19 credits left to graduate. So the university was closing and opening, I was going back to Amman and then coming back. It was a really disruptive year, and I started to feel very alienated from my studies […] but at the same time I wanted to continue on to graduate school. I would have loved to stay at AUB. But with the war going on, it was not a possibility, so I had to apply for a graduate school outside, and went to UC Berkeley. There was an intellectual maturation that was going on that was then cut short by having to leave. I feel that, up to now, the universities in the region have not been doing a very good job of making those kinds of connections for students. It is something that I think we all need to think about how to do better, now that we have all those tools, such as social media. It is not just about opinion pieces about what is going on but—if you are a student of social sciences—about how to employ and deploy these conceptual tools.

DY: I guess your first academic position was at Yarmouk University. What were your early research interests and how did they evolve in the dissertation and post-dissertation stages?

SS: Here we have to come back to family in a way. I think I was interested in issues of identity before they were called that. I was interested in “minority issues.” But I had a couple of ideas about where I could do fieldwork. I got to know the history of the nineteenth-century migrations from Syria and Lebanon and all over South America as well as in the Caribbean. I was really fascinated by the fact that in the Caribbean, the Arab communities were Christian and it was the Chinese or other Asians who might be Muslim. I was very intrigued by all of this, and when I came back home one summer, I told my mother about it and she said, “But of course you have to do your dissertation on Circassians; why did we send you to graduate school?” I am sure she didn’t say it that way, but that is how I heard it. And here my family history comes in, because her father, my grandfather, had written a book called The Caucasus in History.Footnote ² He was a general in the Turkish army. He started out in the Ottoman army as a young officer and he had gone to the Caucasus twice. As a young officer he had been part of an attempt to open an Ottoman front in the Caucasus against the Russians. This was very much part of the family history. He later was a member of parliament for Kayseri province, where there are many Circassian villages, including his home village, and he had written this book, which was a sort of holy book for the Circassians in Turkey. I think for many Circassians in Turkey it was a concrete symbol of their existence, even though Circassians were not discriminated against in Kemalist Turkey—but still the anxiety of not being Turkish is part of the experience of being Circassian in Turkey. My mother suggested, “You must complete your grandfather’s book. His book ends with immigration, yours should begin there.” […] For my dissertation I wanted to make a comparison of Circassians in Jordan and Turkey. […] But my committee in Berkeley said that this was too much. […] So I picked Jordan. […] When I finished my dissertation in 1982, Yarmouk University was only four or five years old, and they were very keen on starting up anthropology, so I moved to Yarmouk. My years there were amazing in my intellectual growth. What does anthropology in Jordan mean? Why are you teaching anthropology in Jordan? These were things that my education had not prepared me for. Younger faculty members were most enthusiastic. There were also over 30 Turkish faculty members at Yarmouk, mostly those who had escaped YÖK (Yükseköğretim Kurulu, the Council of Higher Education).Footnote ³

DY: Let’s go forward a little bit. I think your next position was as the director of MEAwards starting in 1996, which was set up by the Population Council in Cairo. So, from doing research on a small minority, if you will, in Jordan or doing research on displaced communities,Footnote ⁴ you became someone who was coordinating research. What took you there? Was it coincidental or intentional?

SS: It was not coincidental, but maybe not completely intentional either. The key here is “intellectual community” really, because I think MEAwards was set up by people who were very visionary. When Fred Shorter and his then wife Belgin Tekçe were setting up MEAwards, it was a kinder, gentler time in terms of fund-raising when I compare it with now. They had funding from the Ford Foundation, from the International Development Research Center (IDRC), and later on from the Mellon Foundation. Basically, it was set up to create a network of researchers across the Arab region and Turkey—and later they included Iran as well—working on population and development. They were very multidisciplinary and broad in their understanding of population. They really created these amazing networks within networks of people working on population issues. I had never thought of my work as somehow fitting within the population rubric, but they said it did: there was migration, there was displacement, and there were refugees. That kind of generosity, an intellectual generosity, attracted me. […] MEAwards was interdisciplinary from its foundation. And they were working against a definition of demography as a narrow field, so there were sociologists, anthropologists, and there were also medical doctors, public health people, and so on. I actually applied and got funding from MEAwards for my write-up years in Berkeley. As soon as I came back and was at Yarmouk University, they asked me to join their selection committee, which was very challenging, as a new Ph.D. to be on a committee of five people selecting proposals. It really made me nervous the first few times, but it was the only intellectual community I found actually. It was an exciting community in two ways. First, as I have already talked about, there was a kind of intellectual excitement of working with people from health and medicine to statistics and demography. But the other thing was that this committee was composed of Arab and Turkish scholars. People were in very difficult circumstances, often much more difficult than my situation at Yarmouk in terms of censorship, lack of resources, even extreme privation, and horrible salaries. It was very heartening to work with people from Sudan and Algeria and even from Turkey in those years. We’re talking about the 1980s. It was a very important source of community and collaboration and very strong friendships. That’s how I met people from Boğaziçi and Middle East Technical University. For me, the connections with Turkey also started to get stronger with MEAwards. In the meantime, things in Yarmouk started to go sour. It really became a difficult place to be in. I was working harder and harder just to protect what we had built, but that was very fragile. At that point I loved being in a university, and so I was looking around for a university. I really liked working with students. I liked teaching. That was a turning point. Then I had an offer from a Turkish university as well as an offer to direct MEAwards. My decision was MEAwards, and that took me in a very different direction.

DY: I was going to ask you why you never, despite your connections to İstanbul, took a position in Turkey. Why did you decline that offer and take MEAwards instead?

SS: First of all, when I took the MEAwards position I thought I would do that for two years, and then I would look for a university in the region. […] The MEAwards decision seemed to open more doors than going to a university in Turkey. […] And also because I had never done research in Turkey. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that Turkish social sciences focused solely on Turkey. I started thinking about what courses I could teach based on my research experiences that would be of interest. There was not much interest in my Circassian work. My colleagues in Turkish universities were never terribly interested in any of that until the fall of the Soviet Union. Intellectually it did not feel like a home with my interests and my politics, which were much more related to the politics of the Arab region.

DY: The next position that you took up was in 1999, as the SSRC Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa. Can we talk a little bit more concretely about what exactly you had in mind in terms of these communities of scholarship to which you wanted to contribute? It seems that you have a particular type of community in mind, and also probably a particular type of scholarship. Can you tell us more about that?

SS: It is easier to talk about the community than the scholarship, but let’s start and see where we end up. The move from MEAwards to SSRC was partly about the frustrations of something I wanted to do within the MEAwards framework that the funding structures did not really allow. I was very interested in cross-regional work. […]

My colleagues at SSRC were working on South Asia, Africa, and Latin America; this was exactly what I had been missing at MEAwards. People coming across those divides was the thing I had found most interesting in MEAwards, and so I wanted to do that on a larger scale. The Middle East to me is not any kind of unit that necessarily should frame intellectual endeavors. But I could see how exciting Arabs meeting other Arabs could be, and also the Turkish-Arab connection. […] We received many proposals from Turkey, which were often very strong.

DY: Perhaps I should say in passing that I and the other editor of New Perspectives on Turkey, Zafer Yenal, have also gone through the MEAwards. And several other members of the journal’s editorial board have also received funding from MEAwards or were involved in MEAwards activities, including Çağlar Keyder, Ayşe Öncü, and Ayfer Bartu Candan.

SS: You see, this amazing intellectual genealogy is coming out of MEAwards. I still think the donors have been very shortsighted about what MEAwards achieved. […] My SSRC experience has been very much informed by MEAwards, but also by the shortcomings of MEAwards being a program, not an institution. One of the things I did as the MEAwards director was a meeting in İstanbul of ex-grantees: all came together in this wonderful building on the Golden Horn that belongs to the History Foundation (Tarih Vakfı). People had not seen each other for a long time, and we encouraged grantees to present their work. You could see and feel the inspiration that came from being part of these networks, but they are very fragile and the minute the organizing locus disappears, for whatever reason, the network also disappears. That was an important lesson to learn from MEAwards. That is why I came back to institution-building. […]

The very first thing, the very first program I set up at the SSRC was called the MENA Collaborative Research Grants Program, which was a competition for funding to do collaborative work, and applicant teams had to have at least two researchers from two countries in the MENA region, and then there could be other researchers from elsewhere. The funds were for the collaboration more than for the fieldwork. My role at the SSRC in those years had a lot to do with collaboration, pushing collaboration not just as a method of choice but as a necessity in the context of globalization. In order to study global phenomena, you have to do this through collaborative teamwork. This is very well recognized in the sciences and medicine, and in certain fields in the humanities such as archaeology, and there are conventions for how to organize it. But this is not the case in the social sciences, where you have the “hero individual social scientist.” So collaboration and collaborative research are important for me. It is an epistemological shift, a methodological shift, and it is one that requires infrastructures. In a way, everything I work on comes together with this idea of collaboration and collaborative research. I am not saying all of social sciences and everybody should always only collaborate. But collaboration as a practice of social science is very important. If we are going to make shifts and changes in the way the social sciences relate to and connect to the world—to go back to the earliest point in our conversation—it has to be done collaboratively. Of course, the social sciences and any academic enterprise have all sorts of collaboration: peer review, conferences, putting together a journal, all these are collaboration. The collaboration in data collection and data analysis is the missing part in most of the disciplines of the social sciences.

The other thing that is coming now from the experience of working in Beirut is realizing how much the social sciences are predicated on a notion of stability, even if you study revolutions or social movements. There is some form of stability that is informing one’s work. There are agents, there are structures, there are factors—all those kinds of words that we use to explain a momentum have a notion of stability and continuity. When you are living in a situation that is so fluid as this moment—specifically in the Arab region, where groups of whom you have never heard are popping up and suddenly taking over Mosul and so on—you really realize how unable we are with our regular everyday concepts and methods to capture it in a meaningful way.

DY: How does conflict affect the funding of social science research? There are funding agencies, which are mostly located in the North, and there are all these conflicts in our region. For instance, take the September 11 attacks, or the US war on Afghanistan and Iraq. What is the relationship between conflict and the funding of research on the Middle East by North American institutions?

SS: Interestingly, 9/11 did not mean a whole lot in terms of increased funding for Middle Eastern studies in the United States, although it was transformative in terms of shifting the gaze of scholarship and, perhaps more importantly, in terms of the public side of Middle East studies—outreach through media and public events and so on. Probably there were many missed opportunities on the part of private foundations in the US. After 9/11, everyone was asking what should we do, what kind of research should we fund? Private foundations ended up doing very little, although there were lots of meetings about “what should we do?”, “what should we fund about Islam?”, “is it about Islam, is it not about Islam?”, and so on. There were lots of debates but few liberal private foundations actually put money into research. The US federal government infused funding into area studies, for a limited time, especially for language learning. I may be wrong, but just my perception as a person who is constantly fundraising, is that a lot of the US governmental money, the federal money, seemed to go into public diplomacy, exchange programs for bringing youth or religious leaders to the US, and so on, but it did not go into research.

I have a book coming out soon on these issues, specifically on Middle East studies in the US.Footnote ⁵ The idea for the books came from my wish to look at how funding decisions are made and how universities make decisions about opening centers for Middle East studies, language teaching, and things like that. And there was a public attack on Middle East studies for not having predicted September 11. […] It was about trying to divert money into think tanks on the grounds that universities were not doing their job in terms of doing the kind of research that would inform national needs, and so think tanks should get the money. The point I am trying to make is that there is a whole shift in the US—I am not sure what the starting date or starting decade was—and it is a kind of anti-intellectualism, a kind of anti-university bias. Middle East studies is just one thing in a much broader attack on liberal institutions in the US. For me, what was really shocking about the academic reaction to September 11 was the attack on Middle East studies, using September 11 to attack a field, and the way other fields came or did not come to the rescue, so to speak: there was very little solidarity among academics, and basically the whole liberal edifice of freedom of speech, even things like reading lists for students, were so easily threatened. […]

DY: In a recent article, Asef BayatFootnote ⁶ says that, to be viable, studies on the Middle East need more comparative frameworks. Area studies, he says, have been too narrowly focused and not so analytical, and he argues that there should be more conversation between social science disciplines and area studies. Perhaps this is also partly related to funding, but I actually want to take a break from funding issues to discuss more intellectual and conceptual issues. There are at least two questions I can ask: first, how should we anchor studies about this region geographically—this might address your founding role at the InterAsia Program at SSRCFootnote ⁷—and second, how should we anchor Middle East studies with respect to various social science disciplines?

SS: Let’s start with the second question. As an anthropologist you always have a region, so the fact that you study one part of the world is very much integrated with the conceptual apparatus that you use in anthropology, which comes with its own problematic aspects. There is a wonderful article by Arjun AppaduraiFootnote ⁸ about how, in anthropology, certain parts of the world are identified with certain social structures and concepts. So India is “caste,” Africa is “tribe,” and then if you see something in another part of the world that looks like caste then you call it “caste-like.” I have always felt that the critique of “tribe” in the African context has impoverished the discussion on “tribe” in the Arab region; those are very different social formations, and because anthropology has deconstructed “tribe” we hesitate to use it in the Arab region or to assert its “reality,” even though there are really interesting social as well as historical resonances to “tribe” that are very different from what was criticized as the creation of colonial administrations in Africa. What Asef Bayat is saying about provincializing the social sciences includes realizing that every concept has a region, explicit or implicit. If political theory has a region, it is just an unmarked region, which is the West.

DY: I think Michael Burawoy also talks about how, in the US, if you are a sociologist and if you study a region then it becomes area studies, and therefore it is not considered worthy of being published in the top journals of the field. But if you study the US, then it becomes universal sociology. That is why he is calling for provincializing the social sciences.Footnote ⁹

SS: Exactly! To uncover the hidden geographies of these concepts is really an important intellectual agenda. I remember struggling, as an undergraduate at AUB, with concepts like “enclosures,” “the tragedy of the commons,” and “feudalism” or “latifundia.” You realize that these are everyday words in their social and historical contexts, but they are being taught to us as concepts with definitions and at a remove from a particular reality. For instance, when you look at the stages of industrial development and you talk about piecework, cottage industry, or the putting-out system, those are actually ordinary words from those eras; they were made into concepts and they have been taught to us as concepts. We have to convey the historical “place” and reality of these concepts and in turn we need to, for this part of the world, also turn the way we talk about reality into social science concepts.

DY: Then we face a dilemma here. I would like the social sciences to be universally valid, because that is our raison d’etre; otherwise we, as social scientists, face possible extinction. But then we have challenges: we have discovered that our concepts were actually everyday terms in one region or another, a couple of centuries ago. How to get out of that? Maybe you can address the other half of my question: where do we anchor studies about our region? In what kind of a framework do we anchor studies of our region? Asef Bayat makes one suggestion; namely, to have more comparative studies between regions. Another suggestion could be to anchor our region within a broader region, or with respect to a broader region and not necessarily to the North. Could the InterAsia Program possibly come in there?

SS: It could, but I think that the InterAsia Program has never been about a bigger monolithic Asia. It is more about the need to cross intellectual divides and barriers, but this is easier said than done. Since the globalization discourse has taken over, we say these things in very eloquent ways, but how do you actually do the research? I think the InterAsia Program is struggling with these issues. For me and my colleagues who are working very closely together in the InterAsia Program, it is about uncovering connections and convergences that the nation-state historical moment has obscured. But I do not think that is enough. The reason InterAsia appealed to me is that Asia has been most carved up by US area studies, so there is a particular challenge there.

DY: Soviet studies, China studies, Middle East studies …

SS: Southeast Asian, East Asian studies, and so on. Then you find these affinities which are really interesting. So Southeast Asian and East Asian studies have an affinity and they are able to talk to each other, but Southeast Asian studies are not able to talk to West Asian studies. When you look at the bibliographies, you have someone studying oil in Azerbaijan and someone studying oil in Saudi Arabia and they have completely different bibliographies, because the former is within the frame of post-Soviet studies and the latter is in the frame of Middle East studies. Young scholars are beginning to cross those divides, but they are not helped by the structures of knowledge production. The question for us in this region is how can we be part of the overcoming of these divides? I do not think the answer is “let us do InterAsia instead of doing the Middle East.” One of the things that InterAsia does is to allow thinking about this part of the world as West Asia. It opens our eyes to things that we have not seen before, including the connections, both historical and contemporary, through the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, along the Silk Road, and so on. That does not mean that I think connections with North Africa or with Africa as a whole are less important. We do not have to take a position once and for all. The InterAsian Connections Conferences are meant to be catalysts of new kinds of scholarship. Infrastructures that create fields of knowledge may and should appear out of the InterAsia enterprise, but in the long run the point is not to create a new world area called “Inter-Asia” which suffers from the same kind of narrowing down of focus and themes as other area studies. I think that would not be a success.

DY: That brings us to an earlier point you made: that there should be more collaboration for helping build communities of scholarship. You said that the natural sciences know how to do that.

SS: At least from the outside …

DY: Yes, at least it looks like they know how to do that. This also brings me to my concern about the universality of the social sciences, which of course is very strong wording, but let me use it anyway. I mean the way natural science posits itself as universal; we do not necessarily do that in the social sciences, but perhaps more collaboration across old boundaries might bring about more inter-regionally valid social science knowledge. I want to stick to that because, for instance, for me there are social science concepts that are important. For instance, social power, social class, stratification, and so on. We should be able to go anywhere in the world and be able to study with them. It is not like Newton’s law of gravity that applies everywhere that you go, but it does not have to be like the kind of anthropological knowledge that Appadurai criticized, either.

SS: I was in a discussion yesterday about race and racism in Lebanon. If you take something like race—rather than stratification, which seems more universal in a way—the way it has been studied has been so inflected by the American experience with race; therefore, some people naturally reject its applicability to other parts of the world. On the other hand, if we define it more dynamically, it does point to very important phenomena in this region. For a long time, we happily said that we do not have racism—but slavery existed in this region, still exists in this region, and discrimination based on skin color exists in this region; it just did not get institutionalized in the same way it was legally institutionalized in the US. But we have to be able to talk about these things, without a constant reference to another place, and this is a huge intellectual challenge. […]

So I am thinking with you now. The interplay between the concept and the context, for me, is a more comfortable way of thinking and talking about universality, because if universality means one definition of “class” and therefore everything else is class-like, or if there is one definition of “feudalism” and everything else is semi-feudal, then we are not advancing our understanding of concrete phenomena in particular contexts. […]

I like this idea of concept and context and how you can constantly feedback into the concept from your context. This is, again, collaboration, because we have to talk to each other about the different contexts in which a phenomenon may unfold.

DY: Then maybe we can come back to your current enterprise here in Beirut, the founding of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). You are the founding director and again, fatefully, this happened during a period of uprisings in the Arab world. You founded ACSS and now it is based in Beirut. How many kilometers is it away from serious conflict?

SS: 30 km, 60 km, 1 km—I mean it depends. The Syrian border is less than an hour away at its nearest point.

DY: Okay, what were your goals in establishing ACSS? What kind of challenges have you faced in terms of finding funding or persuading scholars to be part of this? This is an institution, this is serious institution building. What kind of role would you like it to play in the future of social sciences in the region?

SS: The first thing to say is that the ACSS is an outcome of collaboration, so there have been around ten individuals at the core involved in setting this up. The plan initially came up in 2005–2006. […] The conversation was about the value of this kind of networking and community building. […] There was not a clear notion of structure, it was really just conversations, and I had a little bit of funding and someone else had a little bit of funding, and we put together a workshop, so it was really built up through consultations and discussions. Then a steering committee was formed, some planning funding was obtained, and the ACSS was legally registered in Lebanon as a “foreign association” in 2011.

Now we are moving ahead and people are applying to our programs. 250 people applied to give papers at our conference, which was held in March 2015, and we had to choose 60 or 70 from these. We now have 50 to 60 applications to each cycle of our research competition. But the researchers we fund do have real difficulties, and we have to figure out how to deal with that. It is not the normal role of a funding agency to get involved in the details of different fieldwork situations. You know, you give the grant and, as long as the person gives the reports, you give the money; but now they are coming to us and saying, “I cannot continue with this work,” or there are security issues or regions and countries that have to be dropped out of the research plans. Every single one of our more than 70 grantees has a problem implementing the research that they had planned to do or they had to change their plans.

So this is where the idea that social science is built on notions of stability translates into practice. You write a research proposal and you say what you are going to do over the next nine or eighteen months, which is a very Anglo-Saxon way of doing research. But that in itself shows how we expect that reality is somehow going to stay still for eighteen months, while you do your survey or interviews. So do we give up? The idea of the research proposal is to give money to the people and say, “Manage!” That does not work; you need to have method, you need to be able to defend your findings, but the whole process of data gathering and data analysis and so on is based on the idea that you can carry out a certain plan over a certain span of time, and our grantees are finding out they cannot. So how do we deal with this? Here is a new, fresh institution, and donors are kind to new institutions, but the implementation of research visions clashes with practical challenges that reveal the inability of social science, as currently constructed, to do its work under these kinds of conditions. What is heartening is the will and determination of the researchers in the region. We invited all our grantees to a research forum in Tunis in May 2014, and the spirit that emerged from that meeting was that of “Research as Resistance”—the insistence on the right to practice social science. This was enormously uplifting.

DY: Who are the current funders of ACSS?

SS: The Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) is the biggest donor, followed by the International Development Research Center (IDRC), which is Canadian, and the Carnegie Corporation in New York, as well as the Ford Foundation. The irony, of course, is that there is no Arab money yet. The board of ACSS has taken the decision to only go for funding from foundations and organizations, not from individuals or the private sector.

DY: What about the Qatar Foundation?

SS: There is no obvious Arab foundation that funds social science research institutions. There are Arab organizations and governmental but not private foundations that fund scholarships and universities and endow chairs, but generally not in the social sciences. So the social sciences have the challenge of obtaining Arab funding. […] Will we be able to convince them that social science is something that they should put their money in? Because Sida and IDRC do fund social science, so we do not have to make a big argument for the field to them. The thing we need to show is that we are innovative, we are effective, we are accountable; we need to show that this is a good project to put their money into and we do not have to convince them of the importance of social science. […] There is a lot of Arab money flowing into human development. Can some of it be channeled toward social science research? That is the challenge.

DY: This makes me reflect on the situation in Turkey. The Turkish Science and Technology Board (Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu, TÜBİTAK), which is a governmental agency, currently funds social science research, and one might claim that it has so far not been overtly politicized. Then the broader question for both ACSS and for ourselves in Turkey is about the freedom of speech. When Sida funds ACSS, does it impose conditions in terms of what kind of research can be financed?

SS: No, ACSS donors do not impose conditions that compromise the freedom of speech, and the ACSS would not take any funds that would impose such restrictions. Of course, there are always certain types of conditions related to the nature of the donor organization. For example, since Sida funds are for development purposes, they stipulate that we cannot fund institutions in high-income countries, so we could not fund an institution in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. […] What is interesting is how ACSS fits with different foundations in different programs, so for Sida it is about research for development, while for the Ford Foundation we fit into the freedom of expression bill, and for different foundations we fit into different niches.

I think Arab donors, Arab governments, and Arab countries all value education highly. They may have not exactly the same notion of education that we have, so they focus on technical education, medicine, engineering, finance, management, and business, but I am hoping that they can see us as a partner in the development of higher education in the region. If they gave only a small portion of funding that they give for other kinds of disciplines, it would be fine.

Coming back to your specific questions, of course the freedom of speech is compromised in different ways and by different actors, including the state, in this region—and not only in this region, as we see from academic struggles taking place in the US, for example. The ACSS, its board of trustees, and its staff are dedicated to promoting critical inquiry that reveals the inequalities and inequities in the region and also examines the possibilities for a better future. […] This encompasses a broad range of empirical and theoretical research. The issue is that, with the flux and upheaval in different countries, researchers are increasingly anxious and uncertain about what will be “acceptable” for the powers that be. This makes them hesitant to do research, to disseminate their research, or to discuss it publically. This is obviously not a healthy atmosphere for knowledge production.

DY: As we approach the end of our conversation, I want to pull everything back into your personal history. Only someone like you could have been involved in a series of enterprises about creating communities of scholarship in the region. I think it has something to do with you being Circassian.

SS: Circassians will be very happy to hear that.

DY: Not because of an essential quality of Circassians, but because you belong to such a small community you had to go beyond it conceptually, theoretically, and geographically, and you also had to go beyond nationalism. Would you comment on that?

SS: One part of my work that we have not talked about, which speaks to this issue, is that after the fall of Soviet Union I went to do research in the Caucasus and that brought me back to my Circassian research, which I had stopped after the dissertation. What was very interesting about that work, for me, was seeing how Circassians themselves began to use the concept “diaspora.” The people I had interviewed in 1980 were now speaking very differently in 1990 about their identity, their family history, and their migration from the Caucasus. I think what you are attributing to me is partly about the ways I see things through a sideways gaze. […] I think being part of a minority group, at least being Circassian in a very small country like Jordan, makes you very aware that there are Circassians in Syria, Palestine, and Turkey. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was the great surprise of discovering the Circassians in the Caucasus. C. Wright Mills talked about the sociological imagination, and I think that kind of an imagination is always a little bit different depending where you are looking from . […] Going to the Caucasus was really interesting for me because I thought I understood “the Circassians” based on my previous research, and then to have a new piece of research unsettle my own understanding of Circassianness was very revealing.

DY: What about nationalism?

SS: This is the other thing: Jordan was the least nationalist place in my youth. I am very grateful that I have grown up in Jordan in this counter-intuitive way. We were not taught nationalism in school because what territorial nationalism would they teach in Jordan, where the royal family itself has been there for less than three generations? Ideologically, what we were taught was loyalty to the king. Our history curriculum, however, was the history of Arabs and the history of Islam, and that geography moved. The history of Islam started in the Arabian Peninsula, and then you have the Umayyads in Damascus, the Abbasids in Baghdad, and then it moves to Spain and then the Fatimids and Mamluks in Egypt, and then you have the Ottomans and that moves you to İstanbul. This was taught as our history: there was no Jordanian history that was being taught at that time. Islamic and Arab history was mobile. And then the Palestinian cause was taught as “our” cause, regardless of whether you were Palestinian or not. Perhaps in Turkey you were somehow faced with national Turkish pride at every turn and in whatever you were doing, but in Jordan one did not see this kind of ideology.

DY: Before we bring this interview to a close, I want to ask you something about the ACSS about which I am really curious. Was there any discussion about including Turkey and Iran in the fold of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences during the stage of conception of this institution?

SS: The first two meetings, before the plan had acquired a name, included Iran and Turkey in the plan, and then in the third meeting the prevalent hegemonic opinion that came out was, “It makes sense to have an Arab initiative.” We had a steering committee and the mandate was an Arab initiative. I remember that my Turkish colleagues were very disappointed. When I heard the news I was disappointed as well, partly because of, as I mentioned before, the value I saw in Turkish-Arab academic encounters through MEAwards, and partly because I think Iran is really important for all sorts of assumptions one may have about the state, about Islam, about religion, about gender relations, and so on. […] However, there is also a logic to Arab social science because there is a language and a literature and several generations of social scientists who were regionally interconnected and actively producing critical writings and debates. This generation is retiring and dwindling and has not been replaced by another that is equally institutionally interconnected. In that sense, there is a kind of past and a narrative that you can react to, and which provides building blocks for something new.

But what I would say is that the fact that there is an ACSS does not mean that there should not be a Middle East council for social science or a Turkish-Arab social science initiative. […] It does not mean that the only way to do social science in this part of the world is based on this kind of ethnic/linguistic criteria.

DY: On that positive note about the future of social sciences in the Middle East, then, we can bring an end to this very thought-provoking conversation. Let us hope that ACSS will prove a ground from which to create more collaboration between Turkish scholars and the scholars of the Arab world. Thank you, Seteney!